Journal Writing and Letter Writing In Homeschool

It has been awhile since I have updated the blog!

MashaAllah there is so much going on, but there are many updates to share.

My four year old son has been writing a lot, for awhile now. He just recently began showing interest in writing letters and putting them in an envelope.  Well he had no one to mail them to! I decided that this would be a good time for him to get a penpal. Not only are we at a time where is emailing and texting, but when was the last time you wrote a letter, and bought a stamp? I want my children to experience the joys of letter writing, as I intend on scrap booking it, so he can see it as he grows up and it also helps me to see how much his writing has improved!

Also we started a few months back the Teach Your Child To Read In 100 Easy Lessons Book. Sent to us by my dear friend at Homeschooling Muslimah Mommies. While my son has been reading since two alhamdulilah..I actually use the book to reinforce and make his reading stronger mashaAllah..the book is to help children read at a second grade level upon completion. We love the book, we are flying through it and I like that at the end it has SOUND writing, so it just adds extra practice to his writing. He even has his own journal, which I date every time we use it and what lesson we stopped on.

A few tips and advice from our family. To get the children excited about writing, we let them pick their own pencils, books, crayons etc ..so they hcan have their own person writing station

We also bought several books, a few of them to doodle in, practice writing, and have fun with and a few on the side only used for homeschool purposes. This does not confuse our children, it actually helps them practice. Our oldest son took his journal on the train and would write in it until we got to our stop.

I am very certain he will enjoy his new penpal adventure. We will be starting our first letter today inshaAllah and it will be good to practic his writing, spelling, and appreciate the joys of getting mail. I LOVE to get mail mashaAllah!

What are you doing to encourage your child’s writing? 🙂

 

I loved words. I love to sing them and speak them and even now, I must admit, I have fallen into the joy of writing them.–Anne Rice

Confessions From A Homeschooling Dad

It’s all about the kids

Whenever we talk about homeschooling the first thing we think of is our children. We all ask different questions. At what age can they start? Is it better for them? How will they make friends? Can they go to college? We think of our children first and rightly so, because they are the center of our world. However, is it really just about them?

Who benefits?
While homeschooling my children there have been some unintended consequences that I have had to cope with. These unintended consequences are that I am learning as much as I am teaching, if not more, and I am certain that I am not alone. Often times we focus upon the advantages homeschooling has for our children and forget about the teacher within the homeschooling equation, and the benefits that come out of it. It has been said that we retain only a certain percentage of information through reading, listening, and experiencing something, but that we retain the greatest amount of information through teaching. This is probably because in order to teach something you have to understand it. Sometimes just through trying to teach a subject to your child, you fortify information that may otherwise have been forgotten, misunderstood, or less coherent.
Many a time I have been looking though my son’s curriculums and realized that there are major gaps in my knowledge, things that I need to relearn. Personally I have found this realization has served as a driving force for me to push myself in my educational development, to learn new things and even to go back and relearn those things which I never had a handle on in the first place. It is a humbling experience. I want to remember how to do algebraic equations, understand the periodic table, do chemistry experiments by watching vinegar and baking soda react. Some of it is remembering childhood, but a lot of it has to do with that thirst for knowledge that seems to have been lost while “growing up” and moving into “the real world”.
Homeschooling isn’t just for kids
I must confess I’m not just homeschooling my kids, I am homeschooling myself in the process as well. I don’t believe education ends with a piece of paper, be it from a high school, or a university. I define homeschooling in a much broader sense than just teaching my children the equivalent of a public education, but rather I see it as a love for knowledge that transcends age levels and carries on throughout life. I love to study alternative medicine, agriculture, and the social sciences like history and political science. A lot of times in my own studies I develop a love for a subject or find something really cool that makes me say to myself “Hey this would be really great to teach the kids”, and then it becomes a lesson or even a completely new subject in our curriculum.
For me learning is a life process and I hope this is how my children will view it too. I want to be an example for them. I am always searching for new beneficial things to learn. As they see dad also in the books every day reading and learning I pray it has an effect on them. As they see me involved in their education I pray that they too are involved in my grandchildren’s education. I pray it is something that my children will pass onto theirs throughout the generations, and as I homeschool myself. I hope that they will too.

–Nick is a Muslim father of two boys and has been married for the past five years. He is currently homeschooling his children with his wife, while managing work and being a fulltime student. He maintains a blog about his experiences, curriculum ideas, and advice at www.abihomeschoolstoo.blogspot.com

The Anatomy Of A Worm and Worm Hunt

Tomorrow inshaAllah we will go over the anatomy of a worm but I prepared for the lesson today.

We wanted a brief and not complex description of the parts of the worm. I used this website: http://urbanext.illinois.edu/worms/anatomy/index.html and used the basic parts for the boys to learn. We knew there were more parts like the gizzard etc but to keep it simple we introduced parts they were familiar with and a new one called segments, the rings around the worm.

You can use stockings for this, we stuffed the inside with plastic bags and then used tape to make the rings around the body..the segments

We labeled each part and then we put the words and their definition on the wall, and it is written in basic terms that they could read on their own, whenever they want to go visit the wall and talk to each other..then they will be able to read it inshaAllah! Without help..so tomorrow looks like another wormy day inshaAllah

But today was a worm hunt, in the fields and bringing the lessons to the streets LOL

It was a rainy day alhamdulilah and so our job was pretty easy, all we needed were our tools…a cup and some sticks then we went digging in the dirt:  

The Week Of Worms..So Far

The first two days or worms we worked on our worm word wall and learned some really great facts about the worm

We learn about how many hearts a worm has and how they have no teeth

The second day we are working on the anatomy of a worm, and more facts. We are introducing new vocabulary words from the word wall in all the lessons this week. Here are our two projects so far!

Our words come from the Dolch list for preschool and first grade.

Then we made cereal worms to begin our intro the anatomy of a worm

We simply allowed  the children to glue the cereal on the paper and make a cereal tree

 

InshaAllah later we will go on a worm hunt!

 

DIY- Double Sided Personal Puzzles

 

We had fun today making our own personal puzzles. We each drew and colored a picture, glued it to the back of the cereal box and then cut them out and put them back together.

 

After we finished playing with them we put them in ziploc bags to save for next time.

The children liked picking the picture and coloring it, we also showed them that when they flipped it over the cereal box in the back also becomes a new puzzle, so two puzzles in one 🙂 pretty neat right?

For literacy fun we added vocabulary words for reading practice (rocket, R, and cat)

We plan on making a few more inshaAllah as the more personal the games and ideas are the more the children enjoy it, the more they talk about it, and the more they love to work with it.